‘Pacino can play Jewish. Okay. You don’t like Pacino, how about Jack Lemmon? Richard Dreyfuss?

‘Jack Lemmon’s too old…’

‘Dustin Hoffman…’

‘I dunno…I was thinking, I was thinking Michael Douglas. I want somebody who’s more, like sexy.’

There’s something about kitchens. MasterChef is all the rage in Australia at the moment. You have a dozen celebrity chefs per television channel, cooking books are the perfect gift for Christmas and Jamie Oliver is the finest political mind of this generation. Apparently.

Course there’s the other side of kitchens. I used to work with chefs wired on something-or-other at night. I came to understand this was simply an aspect of the culture. Anthony Bourdain is a writer who likes to play with the seamier side of the restaurant scene and Bone In The Throat is a post-Sopranos tale of protection rackets, wire-taps and media-savvy Mafiosi.

Harvey is a man with a dream. A dream of owning and running a fine cuisine restaurant, that specialises in fish dishes. Unfortunately Harvey has a few problems. He’s in debt to the local mob and Sally Wig may look ridiculous with his hairpiece, but he does enjoy bouncing the would-be restaurateur’s head off furnishings when he is late with his payments. Not only that, but Harvey is a stool-pidgeon for the feds, having agreed to take part in a sting to take down Sally and his outfit. In fact there’s nothing real about the restaurant at all – it’s a front for a federal investigation into racketeering. A man can dream though, right?

Harvey’s staff are not doing too good either. The chef has a heroin habit and sous-chef Tommy is embarrassed by his family connection to Sally. In fact the only reason he has his job is due to his uncle putting pressure on Harvey. Now Sally wants a favour and Tommy knows that ‘favours’, can quickly get out of hand. Throw some messy affairs among the floor-staff and you’ve got a whole heap of trouble brewing at the Dreadnought Grill.

Bourdain’s has an amusing central gimmick to this yarn. A character’s moral worth is measured by their interest in food. Tommy and the chef are both frustrated foodie’s trapped by their respective circumstances. They see the local mobsters pouring money into joints that specialise in fried calamari and dishes swamped in red sauce. Restaurants that would not know a fresh tomato if they saw it on a shelf, or how to de-bone a fish!

Unfortunately if you’ve watched any episodes of The Sopranosyou probably already know how the story goes. The personal failings and love lives of characters receive more attention than actual crimes, until a sudden explosion of violence occurs every now and then to shock the reader into paying attention. The banter is quick and sometimes funny, but mostly repetitive cursing.

The book opens with a prologue revealing that one of the characters has died, washed up on a shoreline. When the identity of the floater is finally revealed, I had already forgotten about that particularly plot thread.